Avant-Gardist in the Forest

Lorine Niedecker inhabited a periphery, as a manual laborer and poet, in an unplumbed cabin she built on a peninsula beside the Rock River in Wisconsin. People find places of refuge where they might be secure, say cultural geographers; the margins provide hybrid vigor; they produce the most interesting lateral thinking. She was drawn to threshold states, to boundaries between the familiar and the alien, between the facilitating contours of syntax and an alien content, writes Jenny Penberthy, the Canadian professor who has devoted a life of scholarship to Niedecker, and on the centenary of the poet's birth, edited the Collected Works. I'm very happy to have spent all this time working on a poet who is so decent and so good and so good-humored.